ATKINS — Mayor Jerry Don Barrett ordered Street Department employees to clean the dog pound and properly care for the facility after he received complaints of the shelter’s poor condition.

The mayor said the man who’s been cleaning it is supposed to clean it once every day, but there have been days the pens went uncleaned due to his health issues.

“I told him and the supervisor if he can’t clean it every day, I want the supervisor to clean it,” Barrett said.

Linsey Abernathy, who volunteers at the Russellville Animal Shelter, started posting photos of uninhabitable conditions dogs were living in to Facebook last week. She contacted Barrett after receiving feedback on her posts.

“We came by last week and there was feces and urine everywhere, and it didn’t seem like there was any water in any the bowls,” Abernathy said. “We did see food in one spot, but it looked like it’d probably been soaked in urine ... the dogs would try to get up off the ground and on the cages just to get out of the mess on the ground.”

Abernathy said when she visited, most of the dogs carried several ticks.

Barrett said the caretakers at the pound put medicine on the animals for fleas and ticks, and in severe cases dip the dogs in a barrel to kill the pests. But the weather hasn’t warmed enough to constitute using the barrels yet.

Local resident Victoria Carter said she visited the facility — which can house up to five dogs at one time — last month, where she found the carcass of a dog still in one of the pens.

“We went down there and looked and the puppy was dead in his pen,” Carter said. “It was pretty cold when I went down there and he was smelling. And in the cold weather, a dead dog does not smell like that unless it’s been there a while.”

Barrett said the pound averages about one or two dogs per week and they try to keep each dog for about a month, though a city ordinance states they must keep them for only two weeks.

“We try to run them longer than that,” he said. “We’ve had a little success with people adopting them, but not a great deal.”

Barrett said anyone interested in adopting one of the dogs can do so by contacting Atkins City Hall at 641-2900. He said upon adoption, owners are required to take the animal to a veterinarian to get its regulatory shots. Owners are not required to get their dogs spayed or neutered, he said.